Man steals $2.9 million through phony health insurance claims

August 18, 2014 12:01 AM

August 18, 2014 12:01 AM

A former longtime employee of Ohio's biggest health insurance company has been charged in federal court in Cleveland with embezzlement for diverting nearly $3 million in phony payments that he deposited into his own bank account.

Prosecutors say Joseph Satava, 69, of the Cleveland suburb of Sheffield Lake, used the money to support a more expensive lifestyle than he normally could have afforded, including household furnishings, his son's expenses, vacations and a retirement home on Lake Erie.

First hired by Medical Mutual of Ohio in 1971, he is accused of creating nearly 1,400 phony checks that he deposited into his own account between August 1997 and November 2013. He served as the company's manager of credit and collections for 20 years and had the authority to approve payment amounts of up to $5,000.

Satava devised a scheme where he would create reimbursement checks in the names of people who were insured by Medical Mutual through their employers, prosecutors said. He would write on a form that people were being reimbursed after their health insurance coverage had been denied. Satava would then forge a person's signature on the back of the check himself and deposit it into his bank account using ATMs, prosecutors said.

He got away with the embezzlement scheme for years by charging the phony claims to an account through which billions of dollars flowed, making it hard to track.